Science, Jupiter | featured news

The huge ocean sloshing beneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa likely makes its way to the surface in some places, suggesting astronomers may not need to drill down deep to investigate it, a new study reports.

There’s an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighborhood. It’s a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it’s out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. (In astronomical terms, that’s close.)

A pair of Earth-size worlds orbiting a dying star may be the fractured remnants of a single Jupiter-like gas giant, a new study says.

For explorers searching for life beyond Earth, the siren song of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, trills sweetly. “Europa has the best chance of having life there today,” said Britney Schmidt, who studies the moon at the University of Texas at Austin. Astrobiologists think so because NASA’s Galileo probe found strong evidence for a deep, briny ocean covering the entire moon deep under the icy surface.

NASA's upcoming mission to Jupiter can't get much greener than this: a solar-powered, windmill-shaped spacecraft....

The Milky Way galaxy may be filled with millions upon millions of Jupiter-sized planets that have escaped their solar systems and are wandering freely in space, researchers said Wednesday in a finding that seems certain to make astronomers rethink their ideas about planetary formation.

Scientists have found lots of life-essential water – frozen as ice – in an unexpected place in our solar system: an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.